Oikofugic

ɔɪkəʊˈfjuːʤɪk

Oikofugic: Having a desire to leave home, an urge to wander or travel

This word was coined in 1904 by the psychologist G. Stanley Hall, in his two-volume opusAdolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, and Religion. (Given the title, it’s amazing that he managed to hold it down to two volumes.) According to Hall, adolescents were trapped between oikofugic and oikotropic impulses: the desire to leave home on the one hand, and the desire to stay at home on the other. Hall was a great and ponderous coiner of new words. He also described adolescence as being characterized by “a marked decrease of scoliotropism”—that is, a reduced desire to go to school.

One of Kemble’s “Huckleberry Finn” illustrations (1885)

Hall seems to have formed his word from the Greek noun oikos, “a household”, and the Latin verb fugere, “to flee”. So it’s one of those Greek-Latin hybrids that made C.P. Scott write, “No good can come of it.”

Oikos also gives us oikology, a fancy name for home economics, and oikonisus, the desire to start a family. Both these words seem to have no actual life beyond featuring in collections of unusual words.

The Greeks called the whole civilized world the oikumene, as if it were one big residence or household. And when the first great gathering of Christian bishops took place at Nicaea in 325 AD, the resulting Council was called oikumenical, because attendance came from all over the (Christian) world. The English word ecumenical still applies to religious gatherings of this sort.

Fugere gives us fleeing words like fugitive, refuge and refugee. The Latin fugax, “fleeting”, is related, and crops up in medical Latin in the form of amaurosis fugax (“transient darkening”), which is a brief loss of vision in one eye; and proctalgia fugax, a transient, severe pain in the rectum.

The suffix -fuge is problematic. When derived from fugere, it has the sense “fleeing from”—as in centrifugal force, which makes objects appear to fly away from the centre of rotation. But medical Latin treated it as being derived from fugare, “to put to flight”. None of the resulting words is in common use today, but we once had febrifuge, a drug that drives away fever; vermifuge, a drug that causes the expulsion of intestinal worms; and dolorifuge, a drug that drives away pain (what we’d now call an analgesic).

The state of being oikofugic should logically be called oikofugia, though this doesn’t seem to be much attested. And someone suffering from oikofugia should be called an oikofuge.

The difficulty, of course, comes from that ambiguity in the suffix -fuge. So an oikofuge could also be interpreted as something that gets rid of oiks.